The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are off tomatoes and onto jalapeno peppers as the possible source of a recent salmonella outbreak traced to Mexican restaurants, as Jane Zhang and Janet Adamy write in the Wall Street Journal.  Every day that they can’t find the answer is a day for critics of government to rehearse their usual refrains.  The easiest thing is to charge incompetence:  Why can’t those government people find the problem?  What is wrong with these people?  Business are losing money — everyone pities the tomato growers who have, it turns out, been "unfairly charged" and have lost "hundreds of millions of dollars."  But consider the alternative — what if the CDC was doing nothing?  Inaction would mean not 1000 cases of salmonella, but perhaps many thousands more.  And finding the source of disease requires scientific research:  investigators must examine and then exclude possible dangers one by one.  This process angers many, but in the end it is the only one that works. 

When business complains about government incompetence, remember that it is usually business that calls for better government inspections in a time of crisis.  When their livelihood is suffering because of a problem they caused (pardon the graphic image, but someone had to be spraying vegetables meant for restaurant tables with feces-laden water), trade associations and corporations want executive branch agencies to find the problem and get the word out as soon as it’s found.  In other words, companies often want government to take on the task — and the cost — of restoring their good name in the public mind.  In the end, all the fuss about a recall, an inspection, or investigation of food we eat or products we use is the noise of government solving a problem. 

Ned Hodgman

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